From Star Wars to smartphones: How EA is monetising digital

For the existing consoles we're pretty much locked in to the $50-60 MSRP for the frontline titles. For some browser-based PC games though, the model is zero dollars up front. Some people like to call it play-for-free, we prefer to refer to it as play now, pay later. In that case the initial ASP is exactly zero.

Similarly for social titles, and we're starting to see some free-to-play mobile titles. I think that for some platforms, free-to-play is a really important monetisation and revenue model approach.

So what we've done is extended our product lines. You'll see FIFA across every single platform, with every conceivable monetisation model. You'll see the frontline $60/€60 disc, then in Asia FIFA as a browser-based game as free-to-play, zero dollar client with microtransactions. You'll see FIFA superstars, out social game, with a similar model. You'll see FIFA mobile with an upfront cost to download to the iOS device, and you'll also see digital advertising sponsored variations there.

FIFA in Korea, which was previously a purely packaged goods model... over three years migrated completely to a free-to-play model

Eric Brown, CFO, Electronic Arts.

So we've taken a pretty broad-base approach. We co-exist across all revenue models, with some of our key franchises we'll have exposure across ten different revenue models.

Absolutely. We've actually experienced a real world case study with FIFA in Korea, which was previously a purely packaged goods model and has now, not perhaps very recently, but over three years or so, migrated completely to a free-to-play model.

So we're looking at a very compressed time-frame, maybe three years or so, end-to-end, from packaged to purely free-to-play. I think that you have to be prepared for that. For a certain combination of certain markets and certain platforms, that will become the consumers' preferred monetisation model.

That's not to suggest that the current high-definition console market and Wii market doesn't continue to exist with the $50-60 ASPs.

There you're seeing variance or extensions where people pay $50 or $60 and $15 or $20 of additional digital content to accompany the original disc content.

They're probably of comparable size. You can see an additional $1 billion of addressable total segment revenue over the next several years in both markets. Social network games may get there sooner. Mobile games are currently at $1 billion, we see that getting to $1.8 billion over the next three or four years, social network games are harder to pin down, but again, probably around $1 billion. Comparable to Western world smartphone games. That'll probably be at $2 billion a little quicker than mobile.

Certainly there's competition out there. It's a really vibrant genre, FPS as a genre is growing. It's a multi-billion dollar opportunity and clearly we're quite interested in it, we have multiple properties arranged against that opportunity. We have Medal of Honor, we had Battlefield Bad Company 2 which we talked about last year. Five and seven million unit sellers respectively.

Battlefield 3 will be the iteration of Bad Company 2. It's the same team, they've taken the techbase, the Frostbite engine, and revved it to 2.0, so it'll be the first game we launch with Frostbite 2.0 technology. We think it's going to offer innovation in terms of environments, full destructability, scale, diversity of platforms. It's unlike anything we've produced to date.

We think it's going to be a real, direct challenger to the CoD franchise and we're looking forward to it. What I think is going to be unique is, that all the technology which we've developed over the years for our sports games, FIFA, Madden - the character animations, how a character runs, ducks, covers - when you benchmark, as we started to do at GDC, what the Frostbite engine can do, now having fully integrated all of that great sports technology which we've built over the years, you can see a real difference in how the other characters move and interact.

That's really important for a first person shooter because it's all about what the individual players are doing in single or multiplayer. That's going to be a unique differentiator. The other thing that's going to be important is that this team has been working on Battlefield 3 not just for one year, but for 2 years or more. It's a full dev cycle.

Personally I think it's going to be a fantastic title. I think it's going to do better than Bad Company 2 in terms of commercial outcomes.